by Larry Watson
He began to back up, but he wasn’t sure he was moving toward an exit.
Weaver held up a hand to stop Henry. “Just a minute. There’s more.” He reached down and pulled the hem of his wife’s dress above her knees. “Or maybe you don’t need any more?”
Henry looked to Harriet again, and once more she shook her head, perhaps because she could no longer trust her voice.
At that sign from Mrs. Weaver, Henry said, “Mister, you are a piece of work,” and walked from the room.
If Henry could have been sure that that was laughter behind his back, he would have turned around and given Weaver the beating of his life. Nothing enraged Henry like being laughed at. But with his impaired hearing, Henry wasn’t sure he could pull out laughter from the dominant sound of what he was sure was weeping.
Any attempt to determine if the painting “The Doctor’s Daughter ” was inspired by this episode of calculated humiliation is problematical, at best. First of all, it’s next to impossible to know whether the portrait was done before or after that event because Weaver, for what seemed to him perfectly good reasons, seldom bothered to date his work. Although Weaver was capable of completing a work quite quickly, it was also possible that he might tinker with an oil painting for as long as a decade. A single watercolor could have been preceded over the years by an almost identical series. Beneath a fully realized image might be an underpainting that began as nothing more than spontaneous brushstrokes. Even when a year appears below Weaver’s signature it’s likely that was only something he added to satisfy a curator, gallery owner, or prospective buyer.
What evidence is in the portrait itself that suggests Weaver painted it after baring his wife’s breasts to Henry House? Harriet looks to be about the right age, and since it’s one of the few works she posed for after she turned forty, there might be some logic in assuming that that event caused Weaver to see once again his wife’s potential as a model. Her hair is worn in the same fashion she wore that day, but then that Gibson girl style was hers for close to twenty years.
Yes, her shoulders are bare, but since the bottom of the canvas goes no lower than the top of her sternum it’s impossible to know if her breasts are uncovered. She might be wearing an evening gown or a strapless swimming suit. The background—what could be an approaching storm if such clouds were not swirls of dark blues and grays but reds and burgundies—offers no clue. Plainly, those are not the walls of the gallery or its back room behind her.
What about her body language and expression? She looks less like someone who doesn’t want to be seen and more like someone who doesn’t want to be photographed—her head is turned slightly to the side and her hand is raised as if to block the camera’s view. Her palm, clearly creased with an M, is as detailed as anything in the painting. Embarrassment could have brought the color to her cheek, but so could exasperation— oh, don’t take my picture!—or the heat of a summer day.
Finally—and isn’t this the strongest argument for concluding that something other than the incident in the gallery served as the impetus behind “The Doctor’s Daughter”?—the artist’s vantage point is in front of Harriet, just where Henry House stood that day. Who would ever believe that Ned Weaver could imagine his way into that man’s shoes?
26
Sonja knew that asking for favors meant that one had to be prepared to grant favors in return. To that end, she put on the lace-trimmed slip that she seldom wore and her good navy-blue jersey dress. She applied a darker shade of lipstick and a light smear of rouge. Between her breasts, behind her ears, and on her wrists she dabbed the Chantilly perfume that Phyllis had given her for her birthday.
This was Sonja’s plan. Today she would ask Mr. Ned Weaver if he would be willing to paint a portrait of John, and this painting she would present to Henry as a Christmas gift. Or, if Weaver could not complete the painting in time, she would give it to Henry for his birthday. And once Henry saw his son’s image brought back from that netherworld that eventually not even memory could reach and made into art, Henry would understand why Sonja posed for that artist. Henry would set aside his jealousies and let go of his worry over what the townsfolk might whisper about them—how small and unimportant, after all, was reputation compared to art with its power to make marvelous what otherwise was the ordinariness of life!
But Ned Weaver did not make art for nothing. Sonja knew what he would want in payment. She would have to allow him to fuck her. And that was the word she used, in her mind, to describe the arrangement she would have to agree to. The ugly word would keep her from pretending that affection or desire or pity—yes, she could pity that arrogant little man—was behind her action. For a favor he could fuck her. More than once? He would want to fuck her many times. Well, that would be something they could arrange.
She had come close, very close, to such a bargain once before, but then she had negotiated only with herself. It had been more than a year ago, summer, and July’s heat had pressed down on the county for a week, yet on that day he would not open a window in the studio or turn on a fan. Sonja lay on the bed, naked save for the sweat that covered her from head to foot like another layer of skin. Weaver was behind her, crouched on the floor, his face no more than an inch from her back, so close she could tell exactly where he was by the cool of his breath.
He was examining her carefully, he said, because he needed to know exactly the texture of her skin, every mole, every blemish, the origin of every contour and shadow. He was painting her, he told her time and time again, not an approximation of her. She was unlike any other woman, and in order to capture her uniqueness on canvas, first he had to take that in through his eyes. Had she allowed it, he surely would have used his fingertips as well.
Down her spine he slowly traveled and stopped at the hollow of her back. Did he blow on her? Did he sigh? She remembered the chill she felt, and the sensation—so restricted yet so specific—made her feel as though the parts of her body were disconnected. Or did that sense come from the knowledge of what Weaver was doing? Since he could only see a few inches of her at any time, did that diminish the existence of the rest of her? Was she most fully alive where he breathed, where his eye rested?
In addition to this sensation, she felt something else, equally strange and new. For the first time, she seriously considered giving herself to him. Was her resolve melting in the heat? Did she suddenly desire him? No. If she made this gift to him it would be to repay him, not for putting an image of her on paper and canvas but for this moment, for paying her this kind of attention.
She made this agreement with herself: If he touched her with anything more solid than air, she would roll onto her back and reach for him. And she would not deceive herself about her motive. She would not merely be paying him back. She would be satisfying her curiosity as well. She would know what it was like to be made love to by a man who had looked at her so closely he knew not only how many moles were lined up across the top of her back but the circumference of each tiny dark circle.
After another moment, however, Weaver pushed himself up from the floor and walked a few paces away. “You know why I need to know exactly what you look like?”
Because she was posed, Sonja did not turn around, but she knew he was back at his easel. “Why?”
“I’m trying to memorize you, my dear. I’m trying to burn every inch of you into my brain, so I can continue to paint you when you’re gone.”
Gone? Gone? Where did he think she would go, and how could he presume to know her future? But he was right, because a part of her had departed, flown from that room though all the windows were closed. And what part of her left never to return? The part that would willingly allow between her legs a man not her husband.
Today, however, would be nothing like that. This would be business. Henry already thought her a whore, so why not collect a whore’s payment?
Sonja had the photograph of John in her hand, and she was almost out the door when she had second thoughts. John, she was going to ask for a port
rait of John. . . . It was one more way she would seem to be favoring him. On the kitchen table were the pictures that June had recently drawn and colored in school, and penciled on the back of one sheet was a note from the art teacher. June shows real talent! Sonja would ask for something for both her children. . . . She scooped up June’s artwork, and because the air of this October day was thick with a mist threatening to coalesce into rain, she put the drawings and the photograph in a paper sack to protect them.
Sonja entered the studio carrying a wrinkled grocery bag, and by the way she cradled the bag carefully in her arms, Weaver figured that its contents must be both fragile and valuable. She took off her coat, and Weaver noticed that she was wearing a dress he had never seen before. The amount of makeup she wore was also unusual for her. Once she saw him, however, she quickly set aside the bag, along with her reason for bringing it, and rushed over to him. “You are ill?” she asked.
So, he thought, I look that bad. “I was,” he said. “I’m doing much better. Thank you for inquiring.”
For the previous two days he had been vomiting and shitting uncontrollably—“going off like a Roman candle at both ends” was the phrase his brother once used. Weaver was reasonably certain of the cause. On Friday night, he and Harriet had driven down to Green Bay with the Beckers to try a new Italian restaurant. Weaver was the only one who ate chicken, and he was the only one who woke during the night and scurried to the bathroom. On one of his many visits there he passed out on the floor and came to with Harriet shaking him and asking if she should call an ambulance. He scoffed at her concern, assuring her it was only food poisoning and cursing again the chicken cacciatore.
Food poisoning. Yes, he was sure that was what he had. And yet . . . Even now, as he was recovering—that morning he’d been able to keep down a cup of tea and he could smoke once again without reeling—it felt as though a trace of poison lingered in his body, something he could live with but that would never leave him. It wouldn’t kill him, yet it had somehow brought his death a day closer.
He tried to dismiss these thoughts as typical of a man soon to turn sixty, a man who was slowly pickling his liver, who spent the first five minutes of every day coughing in an attempt to clear his lungs, who sometimes found himself breathless after doing nothing more than walking up the hill from his house to his studio.
In an attempt to deflect Sonja’s concerned and pitying gaze, Weaver pointed to the bag. “What do you have there?”
She continued to stare at him. Weaver knew he still sounded like a sick man. Long after he had nothing more to bring up, he had continued to retch, and he had scraped his throat so raw that in the end he was spitting blood and bile into the toilet bowl.
“The bag,” he rasped again. “What’s in the bag?”
She looked at it as though she had forgotten she brought it. “Oh, that. It’s nothing. It’s—I thought I might ask . . . No. Nothing.”
“Go ahead. What did you want to ask?”
“I thought perhaps . . . when our session is over . . . I could ask a favor or two?”
Ah, the irony! It seemed as though the opportunity he had waited over a year for had finally arrived, yet it came on a day when he felt awful. But this had to be the moment—if he said yes to her request how could she continue to deny him what he wanted?
“We’ll put the session off for a while. What’s the favor you want to ask?”
“If you’re too ill—”
“Let me decide what I’m too ill for. Now, let’s see what’s in the bag.”
She went to it eagerly and carried it to one of his worktables where, on the gouged, paint-scabbed surface, she lovingly laid out five crayon-colored drawings. “My daughter’s. In school they say she is . . . that she has a gift.”
Weaver took a step back to look over the entire series: two pictures of children on a playground, one of a truck at the bottom of a hill, one of a horse, and one drawing of a deer standing in a pond. Weaver completed his inspection in less than ten seconds, but he pretended that more time was needed to assess properly the child’s art.
“Tell me again what the teacher said.”
“That she has a gift.”
“And who is this teacher? Is there any reason we should think she is at all qualified to judge talent?”
“Mrs. Knoll. She teaches—”
“I know who she is.” Gladys Knoll taught art in the Door County schools when his daughters were enrolled. If either Emma or Betsy had shown any artistic aptitude he would have pulled her out of school rather than subject her to Gladys Knoll’s crabbed, ignorant instruction. “What’s your daughter’s name?”
“June.”
“And how old is June?”
“Eight.”
Weaver swiftly stacked four of the pictures on top of one another and dismissively set them aside. The picture of the deer, however, he pulled forward and then tapped it so hard it seemed as though he was testing to find out if its surface would crack.
“This one,” he said. “You see how the deer is looking backward? How his hind end seems closer to us than his head? That’s foreshortening. Perspective. That can’t be taught. At least not by Gladys Knoll. And not to an eight-year-old.”
Sonja looked at him as if she hadn’t heard him clearly. Was his voice so bad he couldn’t make himself understood?
“Talent,” Weaver said. “I’m saying your daughter has talent.”
Sonja tried in vain to suppress her smile.
“But many people have talent,” Weaver said. “More than talent is required.”
“She could be an artist?”
Had she still not heard him? Weaver gave up. He stacked the picture of the deer on top of the other drawings. “What I say she’s capable of won’t make a damn bit of difference in the long or short run. It’ll all depend on—what’s her name again?”
“June.”
“On June. She’ll have what it takes or she won’t.”
Sonja kept looking at him, her eyes shining, it seemed to Weaver, with both gratitude and expectancy. Now, pounce now, he thought, yet at the same instant his gut gurgled and cramped and he had to lean on the table for support.
For the first time, her hand reached toward him, but he had to step back. That was not how he wanted her to reach for him.
“What else? You said favors, didn’t you? Plural?”
She stared at him without speaking. Was she growing fainthearted? She had to make her other request; so far no indebtedness had accumulated on the basis of what she had asked for.
“Come on,” Weaver urged. “Let’s hear it. Don’t go timid now. You came here to ask for something.”
Wordlessly she reached into the bag. She brought out a small black-and-white snapshot, and she placed it on the worktable as slowly and deliberately as a poker player turning over his hole card. In the photograph was a small fair-haired boy, perhaps three years of age, seated precariously on the top step of a wooden porch. He held a cone-shaped party hat, but his solemn expression was hardly that of a celebrant. A disembodied hand hovered near him to make sure he didn’t topple from his perch.
“My son,” Sonja said.
“Uh-huh.” Weaver waited for more.
“He is . . . deceased.”
“Yes, you mentioned that. Very sad. He looks like a sweet child.”
“I would like . . . Would you paint him? A picture of him?”
When Weaver didn’t respond immediately, Sonja quickly added, “I have other photographs. If you need to see him . . . different.”
“You would like me to paint a portrait of your son.”
She nodded eagerly, but she must have heard the lack of enthusiasm in his voice.
As tenderly as he could, Weaver said, “I generally do not accept commissions.”
That was a significant understatement. As a young man, Weaver had studied at Chicago’s Art Institute, but he dropped out of the program when he could no longer abide spending his time doing the exercises his instructors asked
him to do. And the early years of his career would not have been so difficult if he had been willing to accept other assignments— portraits, magazine covers, book illustrations—but though Weaver had no assurance that he would succeed going his own way, he refused to consider any other.
“I would . . . reward you,” Sonja said.
“Would you.”
At that, she stepped close to him, and, though her body was at the sideways angle generally not conducive to this activity, she bent down and kissed him below the ear. At least Weaver believed it was a kiss; it was hard to differentiate between the warmth of her breath and the papery dryness of her lips. When he did not react, she reached across his body, took his hand, and brought it to her breast. She continued to nuzzle at his neck, and though her actions had all the spontaneity and passion of someone following steps written out in an instruction manual, Weaver closed his eyes and allowed himself to luxuriate in the moment.
But only for a moment. Weaver took his hand away and slid from her embrace. When Sonja grabbed his hand again and tried to return it to her breast, he quickly reversed her grip so that he was now holding her wrist. He pulled her hand to his lips and softly kissed her sweating palm, the kind of kiss one bestows upon a child leaving home.
Still holding her wrist, he said, “Let me show you something,” and pulled her toward his easel.
Since early morning he had been working on an oil that he had begun the previous winter—skaters on the ice of Fox Harbor. The perspective was of someone looking down from high above, and the human figures looked scattered and small compared to the gray immensity of frozen lake and sky.
Weaver pointed to the skater closest to the left edge of the canvas. “See there?” he said to Sonja. “What if you had come into the studio today and told me I could fuck you to my heart’s content if only I’d dab a little red into the picture? What if you said you’d get down on your knees and suck my cock right now while I was putting a tiny brushstroke of scarlet over in that corner? Do you know what my response would be, what it would have to be?”
